A group of researchers have developed a genomic approach that can track the spread of multiple common antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a hospital at the same time.
The new sequencing technique could help to prevent and manage hospital infections faster and more effectively than current methods, which culture and sequence all pathogens separately.
Published in the Lancet Microbe, the proof-of-concept study from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Oslo, Fondazione IRCCS Policlinico San Matteo in Italy and collaborators captured the whole population of pathogenic bacteria found in the gut, upper airways and lungs of patients in multiple hospital intensive care units (ICUs) and ordinary wards during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The team was able to see the type of bacteria that patients had and found that each ICU patient was colonised by at least one treatment-resistant bacteria, with the majority being colonised by several of them at once.
Responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths globally in 2019 and classified by the World Health Organization as one of the top ten threats to global public health, antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites change over time and find ways to resist the effects of antimicrobial drugs. As a result, infections become harder to treat and the risk of serious complications and death increases.
As drug resistance is an ongoing issue in hospitals and other clinical settings, it is hoped that the new approach could be used alongside existing hospital clinical surveillance systems to identify, track and limit the spread of common multiple treatment-resistant bacteria.
Co-senior author from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Oslo, Jukka Corander, said: “Our method that captures genetic information on multiple bacterial strains at the same time has the potential to transform the genomic surveillance of pathogens, enabling us to capture essential information both quicker and more comprehensively than ever before without losing resolution.”
Nicholas Thomson, co-senior author from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, added: “Integration of this approach could help develop and improve guidelines for assessing and managing the risk of treatment-resistant infections for all the patients in a hospital, particularly those on ICUs.”